The soul singer remains an enigma that not even this incisive biography can unravel.
The dark and mysterious back story of a truly great singer.
Biographer McDonough (Tammy Wynette: Tragic Country Queen, 2010, etc.) specializes in tough cases: his revelatory book Shakey (2002) began as an authorized biography of Neil Young until dogged reporting caused the authorization to be rescinded. Here, there was never an issue of cooperation since there was little chance that Green (b. 1946) would cooperate and even less chance that he would be happy with the results. While the book gives the singer his due as one of the soul giants—largely crediting producer Willie Mitchell with helping the singer find himself—it otherwise depicts him as eccentric and erratic at best, a heartless skinflint to most and perhaps even culpable in the death of a suicidal woman who was one of his countless lovers. Yet McDonough’s final verdict on his subject is that “his life had been so endlessly chaotic and strange” and that “Al remains inscrutable.” Amid astute criticism of the artist’s work, the author does his best to sustain a cohesive narrative and present a coherent subject. Yet the same artist who regularly cheated his musicians and collaborators also showed uncommon generosity toward a drummer who was down on his luck, and the man who seemed motivated by money and ego forsook his pop career for the pulpit after an epiphany at Disneyland. The whole process seems mysterious to McDonough and will likely to readers as well. Was this some sort of career move or a genuine spiritual conversion? How could a man of God continue to be so abusive to women? “You sound like everybody out on the street. I want to hear Al Green,” Mitchell once said to his developing singer, who replied, “I don’t know who Al Green is.”
The soul singer remains an enigma that not even this incisive biography can unravel.Pub Date: Aug. 29, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-306-82267-4
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Da Capo
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2017
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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